Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Bottled water is making huge profits

Up until the late 1970’s there was no
bottled water. Only 1976 did the first bottled water appear when the French
bottler Perrier made its debut. These days you can hardly enter a shop or
restaurant without finding bottled water on its shelves or menu.

The questions we as consumers must ask is:
“What is the cost of bottled water?” and “Is it worth the price?”

Water is a human right and most of us have
access in our homes, businesses, or schools to water supplied by our
municipalities. This water is supplied to us at an average cost of N$ 11.45 per
kilolitre – or 12c per 10 litre. That’s right, 12 Namibian cents per ten litres
of water or less than 2c per litre. (Source: City of Windhoek Tariff Booklet 2013/14)

Now let us compare that to the price of bottled
water. A bottle of water can cost on average N$ 10.00 per litre in most retail
stores in Namibia.

Regular drinking water competes with itself
in a bottle, but reviewing the cost difference, you've got to wonder why or
how?

Most consumers will tell you that that
water in a plastic bottle is healthier and tastes better. According to
international reports - with the help of
advertisements, bottled water has gone from "reservoir to faddish luxury
item to mass commodity.” Bottled H2O is being directly or indirectly sold
as: healthy, smart, pure, sexy, clean and simple, it is "the stuff of
life." The question we must ask is now is that a scientific fact or
something we have come to believe because of the marketing by these bottling
companies? Even more worrying is that it
has not been widely reported that in a few countries in the world concerns have
been raised about chemicals leeching into the water from the soft plastic
material of bottles.

And this brings us to the main concern
(besides the high price and thus profit margin for bottling companies) about
the bottled water. There is no government regulation about what constitutes
mineral or “fresh” water and what are the types of inferences bottling
companies can place when advertising or labelling their products. In fact most
bottlers of water will admit they are bottling water from the municipal source
but are “purifying” and adding taste.

Another concern in this day and age of
recycling, is that as consumers we are polluting our environment with these
plastic water bottles that are more expensive that tap water even though it may
or may not be “better for us”. According
to the Sierra Club (One of the oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots
environmental organizations in the United States), “Annually the water bottles
themselves take about 1.5 million tons of plastic to manufacture for the global
market.”

Did you know plastics come from oil and
therefore it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil a year? Additionally the
manufacturing process releases toxins into the environment, such as nickel,
ethylbenzene, ethylene oxide and benzene. Even with current plastic recycling
centres, “most used bottles end up in landfills, adding to the landfill
crisis."

As a consumer you must ask yourself before
you buy your next bottle of water: Am I willing to pay more than 50 000% for a
bottle of water that is not regulated and checked for quality while adding to
the pollution of the environment?